Third Life

“Arkadin, can you help me with something please?”

“Is it urgent?”

“Kinda, yes.”

The Thantophor rolled his eyes. He was in the middle of cleaning up what looked like a battlefield but was in fact just a normal village square. This dumb planet was filled with religious extremists which regularly blew each other up, but today they had decided to take out a hundred victims with them. Why Arkadin had come to personally deal with this one incident, he wasn’t sure, although he was definitely pissed off.

“What’s the problem then?”

Kairos hovered awkwardly. Curled up in his tail was a flat-screen monitor. “I need some help deciding on a thing.”

“What thing?”

The Whenvern thrust the monitor into Arkadin’s hands and pointed at the screen. “I can’t decide!”

“You can’t decide on what?” Arkadin inspected the screen more closely, trying to work out what he was looking at. The graphics were awful. “How do you even play on this?”

Kairos flapped his wings, swatting away his nervousness. “Uh, it’s not normally like that. I can show you on my good screen, if you want.”

Before Arkadin could answer, Kairos summoned a portal and flew through it. The portal led directly into Kairos’s ‘office’ where he kept his supercomputers. Arkadin rolled his eyes and followed Kairos, realising he’d have to finish up at the bomb site later.

The Whenvern flapped over to a much, much larger monitor and pointed at a character creation screen. “I need some help designing my avatar.”

Arkadin sighed as he rolled his eyes again. He saw the name of the game in the top corner. “Third Life? Why are you even…” Arkadin trailed off. “Damn, that game’s still around?”

Kairos nodded. “Apparently Phovos says she had an old account. I was just going on about how there’s not a lot of truly sandbox games and she mentioned it and I said I had an account even though I never actually created an avatar or anything… All I have is a username!”

“Why would you lie about that?” Arkadin grunted. “You’re a time god, you have literally no reason to lie to anyone.”

“I wanted to impress her! Make her think that I’m as secretly nerdy as she is, and as nerdy as you are!” Kairos tried to explain. “That’s what she likes! Plus… This could be my way in!”

“And what in our mother’s name do you mean by that?” Arkadin snapped. “Are you REALLY trying to seduce her?”

Kairos nodded. “I really like her. And she looks at me… differently. She looks at me the way you look at me.”

“What the fu-”

“I didn’t mean it like that!” the Whenvern sputtered, waving his wings around wildly. “I meant, she kinda sees me as not a big scary god but as a pretty normal being! The way you see us! Like equals! I like that! I like her! And this… maybe this would be a good way to get to know her even more!”

Arkadin sighed. “And I thought playing the space ninja game with you was weird enough… Fine. I’ll help you. But it’s been a really long time since I even touched the game, so I don’t know what’s changed.”

“Not much…” Kairos smiled weakly. “It’s a Temthan game, you know what they’re like.”

“There aren’t any Rethan servers any more?” Arkadin blinked.

“Nope. Just Temthan ones.”

The Thantophor rubbed his face wearily. “Ugh… I’ll help you create an avatar, but that’s the ONLY thing I’ll do.”

“Why?” Kairos asked. “What’s wrong with the Temthan servers?”

“You’ll find out…” Arkadin growled as he pushed Kairos to one side. “Now let’s get started on this dumb avatar of yours…”